David Burton
I build systems that learn from data.
Founder of Klytotech LLC — building production AI systems for healthcare, biotech, and finance.
Klytotech LLC
Quantitative finance, clinical research, biotech. Different domains, one discipline.
I run a one-person research and engineering studio: production ML and data infrastructure for clients in healthcare, biotech, and finance, built end to end. The rigor behind a trading system's risk layer is the rigor behind a clinical study's propensity matching, and moving between them is what keeps the work interesting.
- End to end From data ingestion to production monitoring. I own the whole pipeline, not a slice of it.
- Production-grade Real capital and clinical data depend on these systems. They ship, and they stay up.
- Open by default The tools I build for my own work become public libraries on GitHub, documented and tested.
- Self-directed The best questions are usually the ones nobody handed me.
// projects
Atlas Trading System
Live algorithmic trading on SPY 0-1 DTE options with real capital. Transparent level-based decision engine, 6-state HMM with CUSUM jump detection, 11 processes, dual-broker fallback. LightGBM coming back under shadow-mode-and-ramp validators.
Cognitive Health Study
130K longitudinal observations, one question about aging. Large-scale biostatistics study investigating medication effects on cognitive decline in 30,000+ older adults. Uses survival analysis and propensity score matching. Under peer review.
Lead Generation Engine
Automated intelligence pipeline behind a $30M sales year.
Grant Writing Agent
NLP system that reverse-engineers winning proposals.
Email Automation Platform
Behavior-driven email engine sending 100K messages per hour.
Adaptive Learning Engine
Real-time ML adapts difficulty as learners progress.
Founder & Lead Engineer
Klytotech LLC
Building production ML systems and data infrastructure for clients across healthcare, biotech, and finance. Atlas Trading System, Alzheimer's research with NACC dataset, computational biology platforms, agentic AI systems.
Data Scientist
BTL Industries
Built the lead generation platform that helped the sales team win President's Club — $30M revenue, 2x the next team. Automated lead scraping, NLP validation, enterprise client workshops.
Data Analyst
Prenda
Student tracking dashboards for 10K+ students. Grant writing automation (40% efficiency gain, 200% funding increase). Predictive models for nonprofit donor behavior.
Mathematics Teacher
International schools
Taught mathematics internationally before retraining into data science. Purdue BA, Indiana M.S. Ed. The teaching background is why I explain things the way I do.
Cross-Asset Correlation
When correlations go to 1, your diversification was a fair-weather friend
The Dollar's Gravity
The dollar's gravity: which currencies track it, and which float free
The Dow's Fat Tails
The Dow's worst month was a 5-sigma event a bell curve says is impossible
The 2021 Inflation Surge
The 2021 inflation surge was the broadest in decades, not the worst
Gold in Real Terms
Gold made its real high in 1980, and has been losing the rematch ever since
150 Years of Drawdowns
150 years of S&P 500 drawdowns: the market is usually underwater
Market Seasonality
Sell in May, and other things the calendar does not actually tell you
Valuation and Returns
What you pay for stocks sets what you earn, and right now you are paying a lot
The Widow-Maker
Natural gas is the widow-maker, and the winter is where it earns the name
Forty Years of Oil Shocks
Forty years of Brent, and the shocks that define it
Apple Versus the Field
Apple turned $1 into $8.60. Everyone else mostly stood still.
On disabling ML in production
What I learned when my live trading system's ML ensemble silently degraded in production, and the disciplined reintroduction of machine learning that came after.
Anatomy of the VIX
The VIX spends most of its life bored, then loses its mind
Atlas in production: putting a forecasting system in front of real capital
How the Atlas forecasting system handles 542,000 rows/second of market data with sub-second regime detection — async service architecture, dependency-ordered startup, and 10Hz health monitoring.
How Atlas's database got 810× faster: a single-pattern fix
Atlas couldn't start. The trading system's database initialization was taking 6.6 seconds, blocking 37 features from loading. The fix was small.
Brain Signal Redundancy
62 signals, 21 real dimensions: redundancy that does not look like redundancy
Diagnosing on Three Features
Three of thirty features get you within 0.02 AUC of the full model
The Cancer Decision Threshold
I would rather flag thirteen benign tumors than miss four malignant ones
Pricing Diamonds
A gradient booster prices diamonds to $276. Then it meets a big one.
Recognizing Digits
Twenty numbers per digit gets you 94% of the way there
The Pixels That Matter
Twelve of the 64 pixels are dead, and the classifier never misses them
Forecasting Air Travel
Losing to Holt-Winters by 4.6 points was the good news
Decomposing Air Travel
44 passengers in 1949, 232 in 1960, the same summer bump
Old Faithful's Two Modes
Old Faithful is two geysers wearing a trench coat
The GLUE Leaderboard
The 0.7 points that decide a leaderboard, and where they come from
GLUE and the Transformer Leap
22.67 points: what the field bought by dropping the recurrence
Clustering Penguins
Two penguin measurements beat four
Penguin Dimorphism
A female Gentoo outweighs a male Adelie by 636 grams
Predicting Titanic Survival
The random forest lost. By 0.002 AUC.
Classifying Wine
Three numbers off a wine label beat your fancy model
What Makes Wine Good
Wine quality is mostly just alcohol, and even that only gets you so far
Deploying ML in production: a working reference (Part 1)
Serving architectures, containerization, lifecycle management, performance optimization, drift detection, and monitoring — with benchmarks and code from production systems.
ML deployment: a working reference for getting models into production
A field-tested reference for taking ML models from prototype to production — serving patterns, containerization, monitoring, drift detection, and the operational practices that make the difference.
A local-LLM scraper for Chamber of Commerce directories
Built a pipeline that extracts 296 businesses from Chamber of Commerce directories in 9 minutes using a local 7B-parameter model — 100% name/phone capture, no API costs.
The Bechdel Test at 50
The Bechdel test at 50: the pass rate climbed, then stopped
Bird Strikes on Approach
Birds do not hit planes at cruise. They hit them on approach.
Premiums and Road Risk
Higher insurance premiums do not mean more dangerous roads
Two Americas of Driving Risk
Two Americas of driving risk, and the insurer charges them the same
The Aging of Congress
Congress got older, but it took a detour first
Disease in the Crimea
In the Crimea, disease killed eight soldiers for every one the enemy did
A Century of Disasters
Five years killed 44% of everyone who died in a natural disaster since 1900
Gas Prices and Driving
For fifty years, gas prices barely changed how much Americans drove
Money and Life Expectancy
Money buys life expectancy, but the receipt is brutal
When Coders Commit
The 9-to-5 I went looking for was not in the commits
US Health Spending
The US spent $7,194 more per person than Japan and died 7.7 years sooner
The Health-Spending Gap
In 1991 the US health-spending gap crossed $1,000 and never came back
Jobs That Switched Gender
The job that went from all-male to 96% female
College Majors and Pay
Your major sets the odds, not the salary
Box-Office Economics
Spend more, make more, but a third of films lose money anyway
Aging and Sex Ratios
At 90, there are three women for every man
How People Tip
Tip 18.6% on a small check, 13.3% on a big one
Unemployment by Industry
Construction hit 27% unemployment. Government never cracked 6.
The Jobs That Vanished
Construction lost almost a third of its jobs, and never got them back
Who Owns the Economy
Five countries own half the world economy
You made it to the end. That usually means something here was relevant to what you're building.
Send a message
If it's about data, trading systems, research, or something I haven't thought of yet — I'd like to hear about it.
Currently
- Atlas trading live on SPY options
- NACC analysis under peer review
- Taking on selective Klytotech engagements
Elsewhere
New York City —
San Diego —
